Outside the lines

An exhibit of Monet's drawings offers clues to his breakthroughs as a painter

July 20, 2007|Ken Johnson, Globe Staff

WILLIAMSTOWN -- Claude Monet , conventional wisdom has long had it, was not much of a draftsman. The great Impressionist painter himself cultivated the myth that he rarely made drawings or preparatory studies for his paintings. He wanted to portray himself as a painter of the open air, an anti-academic rebel, an avant-garde pioneer who brought to the act of painting an unprecedented spontaneity and sensuous immediacy.

"The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings," an exhibition at the Clark Art Institute, is out to bust that myth. Said to be the first exhibition to concentrate on Monet's graphic works, it proves that Monet did indeed draw fairly regularly from his teens in the 1850s to almost the end of his life (he died in 1926 ), when he filled sketchbooks with spidery studies for his late water lily paintings.

More than that, the show's organizers, Clark curators James A. Ganz and Richard Kendall , want to revolutionize received opinion by demonstrating that drawing was more important and central to Monet's artistic practice than anyone had previously recognized. Their exhibition does not fully succeed in that ambition.

Simply put, the 20 pastels, three dozen drawings, and four sketchbooks that are the focus of the show are just not impressive enough to warrant a major reevaluation of Monet's work on paper. The show is padded by 14 oil paintings and a series of 20 prints based on Monet paintings by a printmaker named William Thornley , which only help to confirm one's feeling that Monet's drawings are not strong enough to stand on their own. Nevertheless, the show and its accompanying catalog are highly illuminating as they reveal the powerful role that drawing played in Monet's ultimate breakthroughs as a painter.

A large part of the show is devoted to drawings Monet made as a teenager. Picturesque forest and maritime scenes drawn with a deft, vigorous touch in pencil and charcoal evince a moderately promising talent, but there is nothing about any of Monet's landscapes from the 1850s that would attract particular notice if you didn't know who'd made them.

There is a surprise, however, for viewers unfamiliar with Monet's juvenilia. For a few years he was avidly involved in drawing humorous caricatures, and he was good enough at it to be able to sell them to local citizens in his hometown of Le Havre, France.